The Internet and the world-wide web has allowed consumers to complete business transactions with organizations located across continents from the comfort of their own desk. In an increasingly global marketplace, it is becoming imperative for organizations to provide web site content in multiple languages in order to expand their customer base beyond the organization's home country. In addition, as the demographics of a country change to include foreign language speakers, it is increasingly important to communicate with those customers and potential customers in their native language. For example, several large U.S. retailers have announced that serving the Hispanic segment is now a very high priority. Some U.S. retailers have even hired Hispanic ad agencies to start marketing to the Hispanic market in their native language—Spanish.
Currently, an organization that wants to translate its web site to another language can choose from several techniques, each having significant drawbacks. One technique involves purchasing machine translation technology. Machine translation is sometimes useful to get a rough idea of the meaning of the content in a web site, but it is far from ideal. For most organizations, this type of translation, although convenient, is not practical because the quality of the translation is simply not good enough to be posted on their web sites.
Another technique involves managing the translation process by deploying human translators and either maintaining multiple web sites for each language, or re-architecting the existing web site back-end technology to accommodate multiple languages. This requires significant resources in terms of time and cost, including a high level of complexity and duplication of effort. Dynamic and e-commerce sites present additional challenges, as the information to be translated resides in multiple places (e.g., a Structured Query Language database, static Hyper Text Markup Language pages and dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language page templates) and each translated site must interface with the same e-commerce or back-end engine. Further, as the web site changes, ongoing maintenance must also be handled. This approach will yield vastly superior translations that are suitable for professional web sites of large organizations, but at great cost. Most organizations simply do not have, or do not want to invest in, the resources necessary to handle this task internally.
For example, FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating the system architecture of a conventional web site. The web site of FIG. 1 is presented in a first language, such as English. FIG. 1 shows a web server 112 connected to the Internet 116 via a web connection. A public user 118, such as a person using a computer with a web connection, can access the web server 112 via the Internet 116 and download information, such as a web page 114, from the web server 112 for viewing. The web server 112 is operated by programming logic 110, consisting of instructions on how to retrieve, serve, and accept information for processing. The web server 112 further has access to a database 102 of information, as well as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) template files 104 graphics files 106 and multimedia files 108, all of which constitute the web site served by web server 112.
FIG. 2 is a block diagram illustrating the system architecture of a conventional web site presented in two languages. The web site of FIG. 2 is presented in a first language, such as English (as shown above for FIG. 1) and in a second language, such as Spanish. FIG. 2 shows the web server 112 and the other English language components described in FIG. 1, including the database 102 of information, the HTML template files 104, graphics files 106, multimedia files 108 and programming logic 110. FIG. 2 further shows the public user 118 accessing the web server 112 via the Internet 116 and downloading information, such as a web page 202 in the English or Spanish language.
FIG. 2 also shows the Spanish language components 204 of the web site, including the database 208 of information, the HTML template files 214, graphics files 216, multimedia files 210 and programming logic 212. The aforementioned Spanish language components are managed by a multi-lingual content manager 206, which manages requests for information in the dual languages. FIG. 2 further shows that the web server 112 must be re-engineered to serve multiple sets of content in different languages.
As can be seen in the difference between FIG. 1 and FIG. 2, the deployment of the Spanish language components 204 of FIG. 2 requires a significant expenditure of time and resources. Further, the deployment requires the re-engineering of the web server 112, adding to the time and cost associated with the deployment. Additionally, once the Spanish language components 204 have been established, they must be kept synchronized with the English language components, resulting in a recurring cost. This is disadvantageous, as most organizations simply do not have the resources necessary to perform this task.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.